Training novice practitioners to reliably report their meditation experience using shared phenomenological dimensions.
Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn, Stefano Poletti, Enrico Fucci, Antoine Lutz
Consciousness and cognition February 1, 2019 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2019.01.004 via PubMed
Summary
Novice meditation practitioners can accurately report their experiences during meditation states, according to a training protocol that equipped them with the necessary background and practice. The study found that self-reported ratings were sensitive to different meditation states and correlated with behavioral measures like response time variability. These findings suggest that the participants' daily practice features were more predictive of their reports than social desirability effects, indicating the potential for further longitudinal investigation of this training method.
Study at a glance
| Population | naive participants who underwent meditation training |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Self-reported phenomenological ratings from novice practitioners were sensitive to different meditation states and better predicted by daily practice features than by desirable responding. |
Abstract
Empirical descriptions of the phenomenology of meditation states rely on practitioners' ability to provide accurate information on their experience. We present a meditation training protocol that was designed to equip naive participants with a theoretical background and experiential knowledge that would enable them to share their experience. Subsequently, novices carried on with daily practice during several weeks before participating in experiments. Using a neurophenomenological experiment designed to explore two different meditation states (focused attention and open monitoring), we found that self-reported phenomenological ratings (i) were sensitive to meditation states, (ii) reflected meditation dose and fatigue effects, and (iii) correlated with behavioral measures (variability of response time). Each of these effects was better predicted by features of participants' daily practice than by desirable responding. Our results provide evidence that novice practitioners can reliably report their experience along phenomenological dimensions and warrant the future investigation of this training protocol with a longitudinal design.